One of strangest
aspects of modern politics is the dominance of former left-wingers who have
swung to the right. The "neo-cons" pretty well run the White House and the
Pentagon, the Labour party and key departments of the British government. But
there is a group which has travelled even further, from the most distant fringes
of the left to the extremities of the pro-corporate libertarian right. While its
politics have swung around 180 degrees, its tactics - entering organisations and
taking them over - appear unchanged. Research published for the first time today
suggests that the members of this group have colonised a crucial section of the
British establishment.

The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the
Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing
oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it
picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and
sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners' strike, undermined the
Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London.
On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of opposing
factions.

In 1988, it set up a magazine called Living Marxism, later LM. By this time,
the organisation, led by the academic Frank Furedi, the journalist Mick Hume and
the teacher Claire Fox, had moved overtly to the far right. LM described its
mission as promoting a "confident individualism" without social constraint. It
campaigned against gun control, against banning tobacco advertising and child
pornography, and in favour of global warming, human cloning and freedom for
corporations. It defended the Tory MP Neil Hamilton and the Bosnian Serb ethnic
cleansers. It provided a platform for writers from the corporate thinktanks the
Institute for Economic Affairs and the Center for the Defense of Free
Enterprise. Frank Furedi started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies
(founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) and contacting the supermarket
chains, offering, for £7,500, to educate their customers "about complex
scientific issues".

In the late 1990s, the group began infiltrating the media, with remarkable
success. For a while, it seemed to dominate scientific and environmental
broadcasting on Channel 4 and the BBC. It used these platforms (Equinox, Against
Nature, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Counterblast, Zeitgeist) to argue that
environmentalists were Nazi sympathisers who were preventing human beings from
fulfilling their potential. In 2000, LM magazine was sued by ITN, after falsely
claiming that the news organisation's journalists had fabricated evidence of
Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. LM closed, and was resurrected as the
web magazine Spiked and the thinktank the Institute of Ideas.

All this is already in the public domain. But now, thanks to the work of the
researcher and activist Jonathan Matthews (published today on his database www.gmwatch.org), what seems to
be a new front in this group's campaign for individuation has come to light. Its
participants have taken on key roles in the formal infrastructure of public
communication used by the science and medical establishment.

Let us begin with the Association for Sense About Science (SAS), the lobby
group chaired by the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Taverne, and whose board
contains such prominent scientists as Professor Sir Brian Heap, Professor Dame
Bridget Ogilvie and Sir John Maddox. In October it organised a letter to the
Times by 114 scientists, complaining that the government had failed to make the
case for genetic engineering. In response, Tony Blair told the Commons that he
had not ruled out the commercialisation of GM crops in Britain. The phone number
for Sense About Science is shared by the "publishing house" Global Futures. One
of its two trustees is Phil Mullan, a former RCP activist and LM contributor who
is listed as the registrant of Spiked magazine's website. The only publication
on the Global Futures site is a paper by Frank Furedi, the godfather of the
cult. The assistant director of Sense About Science, Ellen Raphael, is the
contact person for Global Futures. The director of SAS, Tracey Brown, has
written for both LM and Spiked and has published a book with the Institute of
Ideas: all of them RCP spin-offs. Both Brown and Raphael studied under Frank
Furedi at the University of Kent, before working for the PR firm Regester
Larkin, which defends companies such as the biotech giants Aventis CropScience,
Bayer and Pfizer against consumer and environmental campaigners. Brown's address
is shared by Adam Burgess, also a contributor to LM. LM's health writer, Dr
Michael Fitzpatrick, is a trustee of both Global Futures and Sense About
Science.

SAS has set up a working party on peer review, which is chaired and hosted by
the Royal Society. One of its members is Tony Gilland, who is science and
society director at the Institute of Ideas, a contributor to both LM and Spiked
and the joint author of the proposal Frank Furedi made to the supermarkets.
Another is Fiona Fox, the sister of Claire Fox, who runs the Institute of Ideas.
Fiona Fox was a frequent contributor to LM. One of her articles generated
outrage among human rights campaigners by denying that there had been a genocide
in Rwanda.

Fiona Fox is also the director of the Science Media Centre, the public
relations body set up by Baroness Susan Greenfield of the Royal Institution. It
is funded, among others, by the pharmaceutical companies Astra Zeneca, Dupont
and Pfizer. Fox has used the Science Media Centre to promote the views of
industry and to launch fierce attacks against those who question them. She ran
the campaign, for example, to rubbish last year's BBC drama Fields of Gold.

The list goes on and on. The policy officer of the Genetic Interest Group,
which represents the interests of people with genetic disorders, is now John
Gillott, formerly science editor of LM and a regular contributor to Spiked. The
director of the Progress Educational Trust, which campaigns for research on
human embryos, is Juliet Tizzard, a contributor to LM, Spiked and the Institute
of Ideas. Gillott and Tizzard also help to run Genepool, the online clinical
genetics library. The chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service
is Ann Furedi, the wife of Frank Furedi and a regular contributor to LM and
Spiked. Until last year she was communications director for the Human
Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. The coordinator of the Pro-Choice Forum,
which publicises abortion issues, is Ellie Lee, a regular writer for LM and
Spiked and now series editor for the Institute of Ideas.

Is all this a coincidence? I don't think so. But it's not easy to understand
why it is happening. Are we looking at a group which wants power for its own
sake, or one following a political design, of which this is an intermediate
step? What I can say is that the scientific establishment, always politically
naive, appears unwittingly to have permitted its interests to be represented to
the public by the members of a bizarre and cultish political network. Far from
rebuilding public trust in science and medicine, this group's repugnant
philosophy could finally destroy it.